Two months ago, upon the airing of the season finale of America's Next Great Restaurant, three branches of fast-casual soul food joint Soul Daddy opened up. Six weeks later, two of them closed, leaving only the Mall of America joint standing.

Now Soul Daddy is Soul Deady.

I'm not going to say anything about the restaurant or the restauranteur/contestant. I didn't go, I didn't eat the food, because there's no way I'm taking a special trip to the Megamall just to eat at a place that won a TV show.

So, we're two episodes into Top CHef 8, which follows the dull and tedious Season 7 and the pointless and boring Top Chef: Just Desserts. The idea is a solid one - there are plenty of chefs from the earlier seasons who proved that they were entertaining to watch and cooked interesting food, so it's all down to the execution.

They got Anthony Bourdain. Good. They didn't get him for every episode. Less good, but tolerable.

There's no house they all live in together. Or at least there's no footage of it. THANK THE GODS. This cuts down on the drama.

You know, Richard Blais? Top Chef runner-up? Top Chef All-Star contestant? Cat Cora sous chef on ICA? Lover of liquid nitrogen, with a pretty solid grasp of the molecular gastronomy basics, even if it's very second-wave, using techinques other people thought up first, kind of stuff?

Yeah, he's getting a show. Premieres December 17. On, of all things, the Science Channel. And it's called "Blais Off".

It's bad around other holidays, but Thanksgiving is the worst time out of the entire frigging year to watch food television. Nobody needs to know fifteen completely different "perfect" ways to roast a turkey. In fact, if there WERE fifteen different perfect ways to roast a turkey, we'd all be stumbling on it by accident, rendering the very need for shows telling us all of them nonexistent.

Clearly, the rule is this. If you've managed to get yourself a TV cooking show, do not, under any circumstances, rhyme.

I mean, the Next Food Network Star crowned Aarti Segueira, who then hosted a show called Aarti Party, which I stopped watching when she made something called a "Huggy Buggy Bread Pudding", and a part of my soul died forever.

Two years ago, the first Next Iron Chef competition was held. The set was somewhat awkward, the challenges were elaborate, and the winner was Michael Symon, who's proved to not only be a hell of an Iron Chef, but a breakout star on Food Network/Cooking Channel. His run on Dinner: Impossible pissed on Robert Irvine from a great height, his Cook Like An Iron Chef is the best cooking show on TV right now, and he's even being tapped in a ripoff of Travel Channel's "Food Wars".